The customer you can't see: Single customer view

21 hours ago

8 min read

Week one of Beyond the Hype, a 12-week series from our CEO Charlie Symonds on what modern technology practically means for wealth managers and providers across financial services.

In 1931 a draughtsman called Harry Beck was out of work.

He had spent six years drawing electrical circuit diagrams for the London Underground's signals office. The Depression came, and he was laid off. So in his spare time he started drawing something nobody had asked him for.

A new map of the Tube.

Stylised metro map with five coloured lines and transfer stations.

I can't include Harry Beck's map here, but you can see it on the London Museum website: Railway map | London Museum

The old maps were accurate. That was the problem. London’s underground lines had been built by different companies, which originally published their own maps. Combined maps appeared before Beck’s design, but they remained largely geographical: the lines followed the streets above, central stations crowded together, and Beck later compared their tangled appearance to “vermicelli”. [1] [2]

Every station was on there. Every line was on there. What you couldn't see was how any of it joined up.

So Beck threw the geography away. Straight lines. Forty-five degree corners. Stations evenly spaced. A diagram of connections, inspired by the electrical circuit diagrams he knew. [1]

The publicity office handed it back. Too revolutionary. [3]

He tried again the next year, and this time they said yes. In January 1933 the first pocket edition ran to 750,000 copies, at a time when maps were normally printed in batches of 10,000 to 20,000. [3]

Every Tube map printed today still carries a line saying it's an evolution of the design Beck conceived in 1931. [1]

We're still drawing company maps

I think about Beck a lot when I'm talking to wealth managers and providers.

Because the track is already laid.

Platforms publish data feeds. Providers are connecting to shared industry services. Aggregators pull valuations from across the market. Open finance is developing. Ten years ago, the answer to “can we get the data?” was often no. Today, much more data is reachable, but access remains uneven across products, providers and systems.

And yet ask an adviser how long it takes to tell a recently widowed customer exactly what she holds, and the answer is still measured in days.

Every system is still drawing its own map.

The back office has one. Each platform has one. Each provider has one. The aggregator has another. All of them accurate, in their own way. None of them showing how it joins up. And the moment a contribution changes, an address is updated or a fund is switched, the maps start to disagree.

The problem isn't access any more. It's joining the dots. Keeping them consistent. And keeping pace, because the network keeps growing.

Platform edge with yellow warning line and white Mind the Gap text beside train tracks.

The market already knows

NextWealth's Data Openness Report 2026 asked 201 advisers about the data they get. Across availability, quality, timeliness and access, 61% were only "somewhat satisfied" with what platforms deliver. For pension providers it was 54%. The biggest gaps were transaction-level data, firm-level management information and consistent formatting. The same gaps as the year before. [4]

The more interesting finding is what firms are doing about it. They've stopped waiting. They're building their own data infrastructure and using aggregators to fill the gaps. The largest and fastest-growing firms now treat data capability as a deciding factor in which platforms they use. [4]

That's the market telling you access is no longer the constraint. Consistency is.

The regulator got there first. When the FCA reviewed the first Consumer Duty board reports from 180 firms, one of its five areas for improvement was that some firms lacked the data quality to support their own conclusions. [5] Boards were being told outcomes were good by firms that couldn't show the numbers.

What I'm seeing

This is my view, from the firms and providers I talk to, rather than the research.

Five things come up in frequently.

1. The same customer lives in a dozen places.

A typical customer holds products with several providers. Each provider has its own record. So does the CRM. So does every platform. They drift apart and the first anyone knows about it is when a customer spots the mistake.

2. Your own data isn't always easy to reach.

Some of the established adviser CRMs make it slow, partial or expensive to get your customer data out in a form you can use. So people re-key it. Export it. Build workarounds on top of workarounds.

3. Providers can face the same problem in a different shape.

One customer may appear in three parts of the business: a modern product on one system, a legacy product on a closed-book platform, and policies administered through manual or spreadsheet-based processes.

4. Errors come in through the front door.

Limited validation at the point of capture means mistakes go in and stay in.

5. Then the work leaves the building.

A reconciliation here. A calculation there. A monthly run in a spreadsheet on someone's desktop. End-user computing is where the trusted record quietly stops being trusted.

None of that gets fixed simply by buying a bigger system. A full data-platform build may be appropriate for a large life company, but it is unlikely to be proportionate for a 30-adviser firm with no data team.

Here's what gives me hope. The barrier to entry has come down. Not the cost; most firms have watched their IT spend go up. But capability that once needed a data team and a life company's budget is now within reach of a mid-sized firm.

What hasn't changed is the decision Beck made. Work out what matters to the person using the map and draw everything to that standard. For a firm, that means deciding which system is the record for which fact. Who owns quality at the point of capture. What happens when two copies disagree. And who keeps the map current when a new line opens.

Those are people decisions. No vendor can make them for you.

The one-minute test

Here are five questions you should be able to answer about any customer, from one place, in under a minute.

What do they hold, and where? Every plan, policy and account, with current value and provider.
What have we told them, and when? Every recommendation, review and disclosure, in one timeline.
What did we charge, and for what? Ongoing fees against the service actually delivered. Consumer Duty asks you to evidence exactly this.
What do we know that matters? Circumstances, vulnerability, objectives, and who else is in the household.
What's due, and what's late? Reviews, outstanding letters of authority, transfers in flight, promises made.

And here's where those answers usually live today.

Question	Where the answer usually lives
What do they hold?	Two or three platforms, several providers, an aggregator, the back office
What have we told them?	The back office, email, the document store, the adviser's memory
What did we charge?	Platform fee reports, the back office, the accounts system, a spreadsheet
What do we know?	The factfind, CRM notes, the adviser's head
What's due?	A task list, a shared inbox, a spreadsheet, a whiteboard

The data isn't missing. It's all there. It just isn't on the same map.

Questions people are asking

What is a single customer view in wealth management?

One reliable picture of everything a firm knows about a customer and everything the customer holds, drawn from every system the firm uses, with one agreed answer to each question. It's a decision about which source to trust for which fact, plus the plumbing to join those facts up and keep them in step.

Why can't my CRM or back office give me one?

Because it only knows what was entered into it. It holds a view of the adviser's records, not a reconciled view of the customer's whole position across platforms and providers. And in some systems, getting data out to join it with anything else is harder than it should be.

Does Consumer Duty require a single customer view?

Not by name. But it requires firms to understand and evidence the outcomes customers receive, including customers with characteristics of vulnerability. The FCA has already identified firms whose data was insufficient to justify their board-report conclusions. [5] In practice, a reliable joined-up view can make that evidence much easier to produce.

Do I need a data platform to build one?

Not necessarily. Large providers often will. Most advice firms and many mid-sized providers can get a trusted, joined-up view with a lighter approach, by deciding the system of record for each fact and building a consistent layer that draws from the systems they already have. That's the subject of our session on 7 October.

If we can already get the data, what's actually the problem?

Joining it up, keeping it consistent and keeping pace. Every new platform, provider, aggregator or AI tool adds another copy of the customer. Without an agreed standard for what's true, more access just means more versions of the truth.

The customer lens

Customers don't experience any of this as a data problem.

They experience it as a firm that has known them for twelve years and can't tell them what they own.

And the moments when the joined-up view matters most are the moments it's hardest to build. Bereavement. Retirement. Divorce. Wealth passing to the next generation. The assets are spread, the paperwork is old, and sometimes the person who knew where everything was has gone. Those are the weeks that decide whether a family stays with a firm for another generation.

Who's doing it well

Scottish Widows gets more than 195,000 letter of authority requests a year. [6] Along with Aviva, Royal London and Legal & General, it has joined a consortium built on Origo's Unipass Letter of Authority service. Between them the four handle around half a million LoAs a year. The point of the consortium is a shared, market-wide approach, so advisers don't have to learn yet another provider-specific process. Scottish Widows' stated goal is LoA responses in 15 minutes, not 15 days. [7]

That's Beck thinking. Four companies agreeing to one diagram instead of four maps.

What this means for you

If you run an advice firm: you probably have access to more of your customers' data than ever. The job now is to decide which source is trusted for which fact and join it up in one place you control. You don't need a two-year build to do that.

If you're a product provider: every day an adviser spends chasing you for data is a day they spend building a workaround that doesn't include you. The firms that matter most to your distribution now shortlist on data. Your feeds and your LoA turnaround are part of your adviser proposition. Internally, the same customer across your modern, legacy and spreadsheet books is your own single-view challenge.

If you're a consolidator: you've bought six back offices and six versions of every customer. Moving everyone onto one CRM won't reconcile them. A consistent customer record across the acquired firms is what makes the synergy case real, and it's the first thing the regulator will ask about.

In plain English: single customer view

A single customer view is one trusted, joined-up picture of a customer, built from all the systems that hold a piece of them. It isn't a screen in your CRM. It's an agreement about which system is right for which fact, plus the connections that bring those facts together and keep them in step as things change. Get it right, and people (and later, automation) can act on the customer's whole situation rather than one system's slice of it.

One thing to do this week

Pick a real customer. Set a timer. Answer the five questions.

If you cannot answer all five confidently from one place, join Poppy Achilles, Stuart Coleman from Tetmon and me on Wednesday 7 October, 12:30 to 13:30, for Addressing the Single Customer View Challenge. We’ll show how a single view of your data, and the analytics on top of it, is achievable at a level of investment a mid-sized firm can carry.